It might seem that Fred Crudder, “the beer guy” at Taco Mac, is living in Homer Simpson heaven.
His job is to boldly go to new frontiers, seek out new beers for his restaurant chain, and drink them.
The chain’s beverage director has been all over the U.S., and to Germany, Belgium (twice) and the Netherlands. This month, he is just back from “beer camp” in Oregon, where he and a select group of beer insiders cooked up their own micro-batch at the Sierra Nevada facility.
On a recent afternoon, he is in the Buckhead studios of the sports talk radio station 790 the Zone, recording some 30-second spots touting the beginning of fall football. The ads stress the connection between Taco Mac and Atlanta sports and the Sam Adams specials that football enthusiasts will find among the multiple televisions broadcasting college and pro games at 26 Taco Mac restaurants.
“The greatest time to be alive is finally upon us,” says Crudder, 41, before signing off with his signature phrase: “I gotta go. All this Sam Adams beer isn’t going to drink itself.”
The benefit of having Crudder serve as the voice of Taco Mac, says Bruce Skala, vice president of marketing, also on hand at the taping, is “he sounds like a regular guy. He’s like Norm.”
Norm? The portly guy from “Cheers”? Crudder, who is, in fact, shaped much like Norm, pretends to take offense.
“I always thought I was the intellectual torchbearer for our generation,” he says.
And, in fact, despite Crudder’s physique and reputation, he is not simply the jovial drinking buddy he appears to be.
“He has a greater level of beer knowledge than any of our other employees,” said Susie Oddo, chief operating officer of Tappan Street Group, which owns most of the Taco Mac restaurants (two of the 26 are licensees). Metro Atlanta is home to 22 of the 26 Taco Mac locations. “He has a love and passion that really even exceeded mine.”
Crudder’s expertise was earned at Bell’s Brewery, a craft operation in Kalamazoo, Mich., where he worked in the warehouse while majoring in philosophy and English at Western Michigan University. He was a bartender at Bell’s on-site pub for seven years, before a friend talked him into coming to Atlanta to join the rapidly expanding Taco Mac organization.
After Crudder joined Taco Mac in 2000, he held some interim jobs before moving into his current position in 2008.
The chain established a reputation for having 100 beers on tap (and more in bottles) at its stores, along with their chicken wings and multiple television screens. To make such a variety viable, and to keep open kegs from going to waste, Taco Mac needed to educate its customers and servers and encourage experimentation. It needed a beer evangelist like Crudder.
Crudder knew that given a taste, many beer lovers also would spread the gospel. “It starts with word of mouth, something they’re going to talk about at the barbecue,” he said. “It’s a common story: ‘I used to drink nothing but blank’ — insert fizzy yellow beer here — ‘and now I love this.’ I’ve heard this story thousands of times.”
His irreverent blog, Fred’s Beer Page, keeps customers aware of seasonals arriving in stores. To educate Taco Mac’s own staff, Crudder created a Beer 101 curriculum and made sure that new employees had a chance to brew their own beer using the company’s “tricked-out” in-house training kettle.
“Now at Taco Mac within two days after you’re hired, you get your shirts, sign the paperwork, and you’re brewing beer,” Crudder said. “How insanely cool is that?”
The chain created the “Brewniversity” system that recorded the new beers that each customer sampled, rewarding those who (responsibly) accumulated credits with access to special beer dinners and other premiums.
On Wednesday, Eric J. Cunningham, a real estate agent based in Woodstock, sat on the porch at the Taco Mac at the Prado shopping center in Sandy Springs, sipping a Lost Abbey Strong Dark Ale. The beer fancier is a “chancellor,” one of a select group with 1,000 or more beers to their credit. (He says he has actually sampled more than 2,150.)
A former wine snob, Cunningham says Crudder opened up the world of craft beer to him, and to the Southeast in general.
Crudder has a huge influence on the beer business in the Southeast, Cunningham said. “And the South has benefited from his influence. He’s influential in getting good quality craft beers into Georgia.”
Cunningham was enjoying a beverage before attending a special dinner at the Fred, a speakeasy-style pub hidden in the basement of the Prado Taco Mac, accessible only from an exterior door with nothing but a Latin inscription to clue passers-by. Customers need 13 “Brewniversity” credits to get in.
Inside the Fred, faithful customers would enjoy pork loin, truffled mashed potatoes and chilled melon gazpacho, paired with drinks created by Woodford Reserve, a small-batch bourbon.
It is Taco Mac’s first foray into bourbon pairings, and at the leading edge is Crudder, who has “test-driven” each of the cocktails, and was, in fact, part of the group at Woodford’s Versailles, Ky., headquarters who picked out the barrels that would be mixed to produce this particular version of Woodford.
On the bottle behind the bar, the label reads “Handpicked by Fred.”
For Fred Crudder, it seems there are new worlds yet to conquer.
